Colin Cotterill
Author of The Merry Misogynist (Soho, 978-1-56947-556-0)
When did you start reading, and what did you like to read as a kid?
I didn’t grow up in a reading environment at all. I don’t remember any books in the house for the first fifteen years of my life. Consequently I didn’t read much. I was a sports kid and, well, you know, you have to look tough. I read a lot of Mad magazine which was acceptable, and then progressed to Fantastic Four and Spiderman. I don’t think I started reading whole books that weren’t on a curriculum until I left England. But I seem to recall sneaking Black Beauty and White Fang under the covers with a torch when I was about twelve. I’m not sure what brought that on. But it was a phase I soon got over.
When did you think about becoming a writer?
I still consider myself a cartoonist who writes. When I arrived in Southeast Asia I was doing a lot of cartoon work and some illustrations. But the newspapers would say "we haven’t got anything for you to illustrate this week, why don’t you write something too?" thus began a year or two of funny (I hope) columns in Thai newspapers. They rarely paid so I didn’t consider myself a professional. It wasn’t till I started work with abused kids that I felt a need to write something longer and more serious. There followed three "child protection" based books and the career took off from there.
How do you write?
I spend about three months on research. (This is fun. I interview people and go places and usually combine a holiday with the research.) Then I go away for three or four weeks and slap down a story (This is the part I dislike the most. I have to keep focused and try to keep the plot going. I have to try my hardest not to kill characters more than once. This process is a pain in the arse). Then I come back with a completed plot and spend another couple of months going over it, making it pretty. (This is the best part. I love playing with words and getting sentences exactly right.) Then I send it to my editorial readers to hack at. (the nice thing is you can ignore them if you don’t agree. But I find that if two people have a similar comment I need to address it)
Do you have any particular story to tell concerning the writing of this book?
I’ve got to the stage in the Dr. Siri series now where the characters do most of the work for me. I don’t have to ask myself, "what would Dtui do in this situation?" She just does it. I’m always challenging the characters and I had held off with a serial killer plot because it wasn’t a particularly Lao phenomenon. But I wanted to see how you’d do a national investigation in a place without communication or records. In the end I thought a victim of one of the many wars would be a likely candidate to vent his spleen once he cracked.
What some good advice that you've received concerning writing? What's some advice that you could offer young writers?
I always wish there’d been somebody around to say, "it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t get published." Because in fact it did matter and if I hadn’t been published when I was, I’m sure I would have given up writing completely. So, the advice I give is this, go into a bookshop, any bookshop and count the number of writers you’ve heard of. Subtract this from the estimated number of books in the store. Then multiply that number by 100,000, because that’s the number of people out there who are trying to get published. Granted, there’s a large percentage that can’t write to save their lives but there are many thousands of great writers who can’t get their work in front of a publisher. So, not getting published isn’t such a big deal. Write for yourself. Write for your friends. Put stuff on the internet. But don’t shoot yourself if you can’t get published.
How did you find the publisher for this book?
I’d written a couple of books that were published locally here (in Thailand) and I decided I’d like to see if I could publish something out in the real world. (Thailand has a very small English readership.) I wrote the first book in the series, The Coroner’s Lunch, and I sent a sample and a synopsis to every agent’s email I could find in North America. I got lucky and had one agent ask me to send him the whole thing, by email. He read it over the weekend and I signed an agency agreement with him. He eventually found me Soho.
What are you working on at the moment?
I’ve just completed the first draft of the first book in a new series. This is contemporary and set in the Gulf of Thailand (where we live) it’s called Killed at the Whim of a Hat.
What are you reading?
The Changing Sky by Norman Lewis
